It was not until a later period that Shelley studied his dialogues in the original: but the substance of them, seen through Mdme.
Dacier's version, acted powerfully on the poet's sympathetic intellect.
In fact, although at the time he had adopted the conclusions of materialism, he was at heart all through his life an idealist.

Therefore the mixture of the poet and the sage in Plato fascinated him.

The doctrine of anamnesis, which offers so strange a vista to speculative reverie, by its suggestion of an earlier existence in which our knowledge was acquired, took a strong hold upon his imagination; he would stop in the streets to gaze wistfully at babies, wondering whether their newly imprisoned souls were not replete with the wisdom stored up in a previous life.
In the acquisition of knowledge he was then as ever unrelaxing.

"No student ever read more assiduously.

He was to be found, book in hand, at all hours; reading in season and out of season; at table, in bed, and especially during a walk; not only in the quiet country, and in retired paths; not only at Oxford, in the public walks, and High Street, but in the most crowded thoroughfares of London.